Too much monkey business

As though to deliberately illustrate what I've been saying, a horde of "impassioned" zealots in liberal clothing rallied in Miami Saturday to hear Bishop Victor Curry, a Baptist church official and South Florida president of the National Action Network tell them that the Zimmerman verdict was a "wake up call" which of course it was not, at least not any more than any case in which the accused was given the benefit of the doubt. The argument that Zimmerman was a murderous racist looking to hunt black people is as disgusting as any of Al Sharpton's accusations, including his portrayal of Bernhard Goetz as a racist for shooting armed robbers. The argument that the verdict was pursuant to the 'stand your ground' law is so earth shakingly false it would show up on a seismometer, so what is this all about? The NAN is the creation of Al Sharpton who makes and has made his living by imaginatively accusing people of racism so egregiously, I'm sure Dr. king would be making speeches against him and his business were he alive today.

Bishop Curry has also staged protests in New York, Washington, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and more than 90 other cities around the United States. This Zimmerman business is a business and a business that needs to foment race tension as much as the Mason Family did.

Dragging Trayvon Martin's head around the country on a pike is about politics, not justice and I sure as hell don't remember Nicole Simpson or Ron Goldman being used similarly. It was far more a travesty of justice that OJ was described as the victim of racism and that science and fact and evidence were laughed at. It's a business, and as much as I loathe racism, I loathe the business of using it to sell product, to make money, to build careers on it, to accuse people of it to further a political purpose far more because it cheapens the real cause, detracts from the real cause and furnishes the real racists a defense they don't deserve.

The death of Trayvon Martin was not about racism, not about a new birth of Jim Crow. Zimmerman wouldn't be allowed into the Klan, nor does he represent some resurgence, some recrudescence of an early 20th century southern white mentality. The verdict was not the result of racism and most of all, neither the verdict, the defense, nor for that matter the facts had anything to do with the law that some people oppose so hysterically that they dishonor the memory of an unlucky kid and a grieving family as well as they dishonor truth, decency and the liberal causes of justice and freedom for all.

Zimmerman got off because the prosecution could not prove that Martin was not holding him down so that he couldn't run away. That is an argument based on the older law requiring the duty to retreat, not the Stand your Ground law which did not permit Zimmerman to pursue or confront Martin nor to threaten him. Such actions would, as I read the law, nullify his claim to self defense and his right to draw a weapon.

Are we willing to dispense with the presumption of innocence because of the presumption of racism?

That Zimmerman was wont to call 911 when seeing suspicious characters in his neighborhood shows only that he was doing what a neighborhood watch participant is supposed to do, and when a preponderance of unidentified people and a preponderance of those engaging in vandalism are black those calls are evidence of racism only to racists.

I'm all for practical gun control. I passionately hate racism and racists and bigots of all kinds, and I hate it when bigotry, stereotyping, racism and outright lies are used by people getting rich pretending to fight it.

3 Comments:

You're last paragraph regarding the gun control touched on a vastly overlook and for that matter ignored issue concerning this trial.

You see, if it weren't for the presence of a gun, this incident would've only ended up with assault or battery charges against either Zimmerman or Martin. If that's the case, we would've never heard about this incident, cause there's no way the national media would've picked up a story about a local assault.

However, it was the involvement of a gun that turned that night into a tragedy. The painfully obvious truth is that minus a gun, Martin would still be alive today and would've had his day in court.

I'm happy to talk about that, but although your observation is logically true, it requires to be a practical idea, that we can make things go away by banning them and history laughs at that notion. Can you make a hundred million guns go away? Really? You can say "if there were no alcohol, nobody would be an alcoholic" but Prohibition sure as hell didn't make alcohol go away or alcoholism for that matter.

The hidden but crucial assumption in the argument for gun bans is that guns have no legitimate use but for murder and that the public cannot be trusted to own them which, is false in my opinion and makes makes this as useful and observation as saying if the police didn't have guns, 'Amadou Diallo would still be alive' and you know, without billy clubs, you'd never have heard of Rodney King. Without airplanes, those two Chinese girls would still be alive and CNN would have had to talk endlessly about something else. Kind of a tautology, I think.

Do I think neighborhood watch people should carry guns? No, obviously. Florida gun laws forbid vigilantism and Arming yourself and seeking out danger is legally questionable as well as idiotic, but this case is being celebrated because the professional, for-profit, anti-racism people and the anti-gun people have chosen it as a poster case, not because it's more laden with meaning than a host of other cases. It's about exciting the base.

Selective outrage -- anger on demand -- hysteria at the touch of a button.

Until it can be shown that any particular gun control measure has any statistical evidence of effectiveness, the passionate arguments -- like those for the death penalty or the benefits of tax cuts for the rich -- remain rhetorical exercises, yet we keep calling for gun control, gun control as though the how, what and does it work questions were irrelevant.